You’ve probably seen Lovelace before: looking casual-cool in warm-ups and a pony tail maybe, or wearing a red blazer and pearls, hair down, all business. When Boys & Girls hit Madison Square Garden for last year’s Class AA city championship against Coney Island’s Lincoln High, Lovelace became a media darling. She was the first woman to coach a boys team to the Garden, and the team’s success—a 32–3 record and a top-20 national ranking, along with the school’s first trip to the title game since 1979—culminated in a Spike Lee-narrated, CBS-produced segment during last year’s Final Four. Lee waxed poetic about Brooklyn, but reserved his highest praise for the 38-year-old Lovelace. By the time the players flashed on the screen, one-by-one calling her their “second mother,” the woman everyone calls Love had cemented her rep as one of the city’s top coaches.

That she’s coaching one of New York’s storied programs (one that’s nurtured the likes of Lenny Wilkens, Connie Hawkins, and Pearl Washington), in one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods, has everything to do with her hoops upbringing on the courts of Brooklyn. She was eight and the boys at P.S. 335 were short a player. They’d seen Lovelace, then a lanky tomboy, dominate after-school kickball games, so they asked her to fill in, with two caveats: Play defense and don’t shoot. “In the flow of the game, though, they started getting me the ball,” Lovelace says. “So I shot, and I missed. And they were like, ‘Yo, we told you, just play defense. Don’t shoot!’ But I kind of liked the way it felt.”

Before the boys knew it, Lovelace was the one picking the teams, calling out screens, and dominating games. As a teenager, she’d stay at the P.S. 335 court till midnight, forcing her parents, Charles and Marie, to drag her home. She entered Boys & Girls a street-smart 5-foot-10 slasher who could grab the rim with two hands, and left an all-city wing who averaged 35 points a game her senior year. After making the juco All-America team at Hilbert College in upstate New York, she landed a scholarship to Seton Hall. Days after signing, though, she broke her left kneecap. Her career as a Pirate would include two more knee injuries and little PT, but she graduated with a degree in physical education.

Her first job, as a gym teacher at Boys & Girls, is still the only real job she’s ever had. Shortly after Lovelace started teaching, then-principal Frank Mickens took a shine to her and sought out her advice when it came time to hire a new boys’ basketball coach. He’d already leafed through 75 applications. The applicants guaranteed individual workouts, videotaped practices, and even post-game film study. It was impressive, but something was missing.

Mickens had led the Kangaroos to two city titles, including their last one in ’79. By 1994 the program had lost its luster, and the unorthodox Mickens—who had banned gold teeth and excessive jewelry and made male students wear ties twice a week to try to improve what many considered one of the city’s worst schools—was ready to shake things up. That September he often met with Lovelace in his office, talking hoops and evaluating the job candidates.

Love hadn’t applied, she’d never before coached, and she was, well, a she. “But the more I thought about it,” Mickens says, “the more I thought, Look, this is our soul. This is our kid. This is who we raised in this school and in this community. This is going to be somebody who’s going to have this job for a long time. And then I never told her that I was going to do it.”

While some students ran up to congratulate a stunned Lovelace, others shook their heads in disbelief. “How they gonna hire a lady coach?” moaned one boy.

One October morning Mickens’ voice boomed over the intercom and stopped everything. He dragged out the announcement like a showman, before finally declaring that the new boys basketball coach for the 1994–95 season was…Ruth Lovelace. While some students ran up to congratulate a stunned Lovelace, others shook their heads in disbelief. “How they gonna hire a lady coach?” moaned one boy. This was the old Boys High, 10-time city champs, The Pride of Bed-Stuy. Her gym class buzzing, she worried that he was just playing a practical joke.

Lovelace’s mind was racing. When she finally made her way down to the office to confront Mickens, he asked, “Yo, Kid, you ready, right?” She stood there, shocked. “You sure about this, Mick?”

Mickens smiled. “Go for it, Kid.”

You have to be tough, they told her. So many had warned Lovelace that the kids would test her, at least early on. And they did. “It was like pulling teeth,” she says of those first few practices. “You had to make them understand it was your way or no way.”

The biggest grumblers were outside the program, people from Bed-Stuy who didn’t think a woman was up to the task of coaching the team. “There are a lot of haters out there,” says longtime Boys & Girls AD Sheila Shale. But if they expected her to have been affected by the laughs and whispers, to have broken down at some point or another, they must’ve forgotten where Ruth Lovelace grew up. If she weren’t thick-skinned, she wouldn’t have made it out of Brooklyn in the first place.

She ignored the noise away from the gym and made her team listen the only way she knew how: She made them run. Her ultimate punishment is the “chill-out drill,” in which the entire team runs suicides to pay for one player’s misdeeds—with the offending player watching from the sidelines. Lovelace isn’t a screamer, but she does want her teams to play fast, to get out on the break and press, and she’s fanatical about building her team’s legs by running over the Brooklyn Bridge or by grinding out miles around the high school track. The Kangaroos don’t beat teams so much as overwhelm them.

The players fell in line quickly. It took a while, though, for the rest of the community to fully back the new coach. There were times, too, that she would see opposing coaches get preferential treatment, like when the Kangaroos played Bed-Stuy rival Robeson High, and Larry Major, Robeson’s ex-coach, could do and say whatever he wanted. She couldn’t help but think that it was because she was a woman. “But if I said anything, they’d be like, ‘All right, Ruth, we’ve heard enough,’” she says. “And I’m like, ‘But he’s in the middle of the court, cursing you out!’ You had to gain your respect.”

She ignored the noise away from the gym and made her team listen the only way she knew how: She made them run.

She’s still fighting those battles. As Boys & Girls warmed up for a holiday tourney game against Towson (Md.) Catholic last season, McDonald’s All-American forward (and now Sacramento King) Donté Greene scoffed: “When I saw her on the sideline, I thought to myself, ‘We’re about to blow this team out.’” After the Kangaroos won a tight game, Greene said he’d have loved playing for Lovelace. And at the press conference before the PSAL title game, Tiny Morton, Lincoln’s coach, explained that he had a new motivation in what was his sixth straight title game. “People are calling me saying, ‘Don’t get beat by a female!’” he said, to the laughs of the assembled reporters.

Even after last year’s title game, which the Kangaroos lost, 77–50, in a sloppy game marred by a wild brawl in the Garden’s upper reaches, Lovelace was treated like royalty at the Women’s Final Four in Cleveland. Because of her track record, and because of the recent publicity, college coaches and athletics directors have taken notice, and offers for D-1 women’s coaching gigs have started to trickle in. Lovelace isn’t sure what to think, despite the salary and exposure bumps. “Most people say, ‘Are you crazy? If it was me…’” she says. “But those people don’t know my gut, my heart. My heart is here. What if my salary doubles at the collegiate level, but my stress level does too? Is it worth the extra hundred thousand dollars?”

Plus, these offers are to coach women, not men. It’s been 15 years since Bernadette Mattox worked as an assistant for Rick Pitino at Kentucky, four years since Ashley McElhiney was fired after 24 games with the ABA’s Nashville Rhythm and just months since Tyler Hansbrough said he’d be uncomfortable playing for a woman. “It would take, first of all, an AD that was confident and felt he had the best candidate—and if that’s a female, then that’s who he’d hire,” says Tennessee coach Pat Summitt. “That’s a whole different territory for most ADs. How are the male student-athletes going to accept this? Nobody knows.”

If Clayton needed some extra cash for a haircut, or a tuxedo shirt for the prom, or whatever, Love had his back.

So how do the guys at Boys & Girls accept her? Well, she stays out of their way when she has to—after games, she waits until her players are changed before talking to them—and gets in their faces when she has to. Take her relationship with point guard Clayton Sterling. He had a rough time after his dad lost his job, what with the family’s bouncing around from place to place, even moving into a Bronx shelter for a while. His parents separated, leaving Clayton’s mom, LaVerne, alone to raise five kids. They didn’t even own an iron, and Clayton remembers laying his school clothes under his mattress to press them for the next day. Things were better now that they lived in an apartment of their own in Brownsville, but Love had reached out from the very start, giving a shy freshman a pair of her sneakers to replace the ratty kicks he’d worn long past their usefulness. Her practices and study halls provided Clayton space away from home, away from neighborhood toughs who mugged him on the way to an early-morning practice last year. If he needed some extra cash for a haircut, or a tuxedo shirt for the prom, or whatever, Love had his back. Now he’s the Kangaroos’ captain, and next fall he’ll be playing at one of the four or five mid-majors still recruiting him.

Clayton’s not the only one, and he knows it. He knows Tyrell Cruz, a former all-Brooklyn guard who as a 15-year-old walked into his apartment and found his mother dead, hanging in the kitchen. He knows that Lovelace’s relentless encouragement kept Cruz going, that it was the only was he could get up, go to class, hit study hall and practice. He also knows of Amadou Fall, the faculty favorite whose family moved to Brooklyn from Dakar, Senegal, in 1998. Fall spoke six languages, held a 90 average and was a star forward, but when a career change forced his mother to move to Cincinnati before his senior year, Fall faced leaving his American support system. So Stephen Holder, Mickens’ successor, asked Lovelace if she could put Fall up in the Bed-Stuy home she’d just bought, located just blocks from Boys & Girls. She said yes, and Fall soon fell under Lovelace’s ever-expanding tent.

“They love me, these kids,” Lovelace says. “They love me because I’m real.”